Disney Lorcana publisher pulls online sales for new set Rise of the Floodborn after DDoS attack

Disney Lorcana’s online website was apparently the victim of a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, leaving players in colossal digital queues for several hours before publisher Ravensburger eventually pulled the plug on the whole endeavour.

Lorcana’s second set, Rise of the Floodborn, hit digital retail on November 20th after a massive hobby store launch earlier last week, but very few individuals made it out of the webstore line with successfully purchased cards. The official website, which ran through Ravensburger’s own infrastructure, seemed to buckle under the sheer weight of traffic and left many with website errors, suddenly empty carts, double charges on their cards and sudden kicks to the back of a queue that stretched into the hundreds of thousands.

“Today we at Ravensburger experienced an extremely large DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack which severely disrupted the launch of Disney Lorcana: Rise of the Floodborn,” Ravensburger said in an update on their website that was reposted across Lorcana’s social media. “Our team has worked extremely hard to solve this problem over the course of the day, but unfortunately that has not been possible. As of now we are officially ending our website sales of Disney Lorcana: Rise of the Floodborn.”

“While we are not able to offer more specific details at this time, we want to apologise to consumers who had a negative experience during our launch today - we truly appreciate your support and are committed to improving your experience of future launches,” the post concludes.

Monday’s DDoS attack was not necessarily a malicious act meant to crash Ravensburger’s website. While the publisher has not confirmed anything with Dicebreaker (though we have reached out), it is much more likely due to an overwhelming number of bots and automated purchasing scripts attempting to swallow as much product as possible. Rare, valuable Lorcana cards are already fetching five-digit prices on the secondary market, but the sheer demand means any kind of product - booster packs, starter decks, etc. - carry an artificially inflated cost on an extremely limited stock.

Such a market squeeze affects local hobby shops as well who must ration the limited amounts of shipped product at markups in an attempt to create a viable profit margin. Ravensburger has promised its initial wave of The First Chapter reprints to the US, leaving Europe and the UK shelves empty of cards that have been difficult - if not impossible - to find for months.

For many, direct sales through Lorcana’s official website allowed players to pay MSRP weeks before the set would be available through mass retailers. Without it, they must choose to pay above recommended price on a vanishing pool of sealed products or wait and try their luck in the aisles of Target and Walmart.

Ravensburger has not said whether it will honour or reimburse individuals affected by the DDoS attack. Similarly, we don’t know when to expect the publisher to begin selling Disney Lorcana directly through its website.